The Biggest Hypocrite in Congress?

NASHVILLE—Two abortions. Maybe three, if you count the one he pressured a girlfriend—who happened to be his patient—to get. Pulling out a gun during an argument with his first wife. Prescribing pills to another patient while they dated. Getting reprimanded by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners for dallying with patients, an ethics violation.

Voters in Tennessee’s 4th Congressional District had plenty of reasons not to vote for incumbent Scott DesJarlais last week. The Tea Party Republican might have snuck under the radar to win a first term in 2010 and held back an onslaught of negative publicity long enough to capture a second one in 2012, but a third time? When conservative voters in this district, which stretches from the edges of Chattanooga to Nashville, went to the polls, they were widely expected to run off a pro-life, family-values conservative who had shown in divorce court that he could bend those beliefs in his own life. If this was supposed to be a throw-the-bums-out kind of year in Congress, then DesJarlais was the ultimate bum, and he ought to have joined Ralph Hall, Kerry Bentivolio and Eric Cantor as the only incumbent members of Congress to lose thus far.

As a reporter who has followed DesJarlais these past 21 months, I have watched with a mixture of amazement and respect as he—running for re-election for the first time since it surfaced that his personal life could have been a storyline from “Nip/Tuck” and written off by political handicappers in both Tennessee and Washington—has managed to mount a comeback with little money or political support. In a year in which incumbents have beaten back challengers nationwide, a DesJarlais win could very well be the most extraordinary feat of them all, putting him alongside the likes of Ohio’s notorious James Traficant, who served nearly 20 years despite charges of tax-evasion, taking bribes from mobsters and forcing his aides to clean horse stalls on his farm, in the ranks of some the most improbable congressional hangers-on of all time.

To his supporters, DesJarlais embodies the ideal of the citizen-legislator. He had never run for office before 2009, when in the conservative backlash that followed Obama’s election he first decided to try for Congress. He emerged from a crowded field to win the Republican nomination, and it was only in the fall of 2010 that voters first got a hint that he had a salacious past. Allegations surfaced that DesJarlais had shown a pattern of erratic and potentially abusive behavior, including dry-firing an unloaded gun at a bedroom door while his ex-wife huddled inside and holding a pistol in his mouth for as long as three hours, all detailed in the 2001 record of his divorce. Most voters wrote off the claims, viewing them as a desperate attempt by Democratic Rep. Lincoln Davis to turn back the tea party tide.

DesJarlais was better prepared the next time around. In the fall of 2012, rumors began to circulate that he had engaged in a series of liaisons—with co-workers and patients—that had also been documented in his divorce file. (These eventually would form the core of the ethics complaint filed against him.) The file showed DesJarlais had supported two abortions by his ex-wife, one for “therapeutic reasons” and another because “things were not going well,” and had pressured a patient he’d been seeing to travel to Georgia for one. (DesJarlais claims he was trying to get her to admit she wasn’t really pregnant.) DesJarlais’ lawyers fought the file’s release, even though it was a public record. The day before the election, they and Democratic attorneys still were arguing in a Chattanooga courtroom over how fast the documents could be transcribed. DesJarlais lost the case, but the ruling came too late for the voters. Tennesseans didn’t learn the full extent of his behavior until after their ballots had been cast.